Early reports suggest tonight’s reportedly final 8 pm House Select Committee hearing on the January 6 Capitol attack will be quite the stemwinder. According to The Washington Post, one core element of the evening will involve showing outtakes of a video Donald Trump tried to make the day after the attack. The video was intended to calm the waters, but as the Post has it, “Over the course of an hour of trying to tape the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.”
You just knew Dr. Strangelove trying to suppress a Nazi salute was going to be in this somewhere.
It gets deeper. We all recall how heated everyone was in the immediate aftermath of the attack. No lesser lights than Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and even notorious lickspittle Lindsey Graham publicly washed their hands of Trump. In that climate, according to a CNN report, Trump was pushed to make that video because “his own cabinet might be preparing to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.”
Chicken-fried Trump is not the only item on the menu, as Rolling Stone reports:
The Jan. 6 committee plans to use its Thursday-night hearing to call out insurrection-friendly lawmakers who cowered during the Capitol attack but have since downplayed the insurrection’s severity, according to two sources familiar with the committee’s planning.
“They have plans to paint a really striking picture of how some of Trump’s greatest enablers of his coup plot were — no matter what they’re saying today — quaking in their boots and doing everything shy of crying out for their moms,” one source tells Rolling Stone. “If any of [these lawmakers] were capable of shame, they would be humiliated.”
In other words, tonight’s festivities will apparently be a nationally broadcast humble pie, and everyone in Trump’s corner has to take a bite. This hearing also comes just after the prosecution rested its case against Trump ally Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress. Only two witnesses were called. The defense attempted to “flood the zone with shit,” in the immortal words of Mr. Bannon, but was soundly smacked down by Judge Carl J. Nichols. “I do not intend for this to become a political case,” the judge warned the defense, “a political circus, a forum for partisan politics.” Thus was Bannon deprived use of the most well-worn club in his bag.
Trump’s Allies in Congress Are About to Be Humiliated in Prime Time (truthout.org)